Working Around the House and Building a Life

I am a huge fan of the website brainpickings.org.  Their weekly newsletter comes out on Sunday afternoon and it is a huge ritual to find the exact right time to spend time in the white chair in my sitting room and read BrainPickings.  I even write down my favorite quotes in my "Kristen's Life"  journal.

Recently, the author of the website was providing her debrief on the best books of the year, one of which was Rebecca Solnit's Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.   One of my yearly rituals is to do a very thorough cleaning of my house at the beginning of the year, so this quote stood out to me:

"Admiring houses from the outside is often about imagining entering them, living in them, having a calmer, more harmonious, deeper life.  Buildings become theaters and fortresses for private life and inward thought, and buying and decorating is so much easier than living or thinking according to those ideas. Thus the dream of a house can be the eternally postponed preliminary step to taking up the lives we wish we were living.  Houses are cluttered with wishes, the invisible furniture on which we keep bruising our shins."

This stood out to me for three reasons:

1. I frequently find myself furnishing my life rather than living my life.  For instance, I want to learn to play the guitar.  My dad got me a guitar, I bought a Groupon for online guitar lessons.  And yet instead of practicing the guitar, I went and bought a guitar case.   I am fully furnished for guitar playing and yet am playing no guitar.  Same goes for yoga, I have all of the "stuff", but not the practice.  

2. Every year, I set my intentions for the new year to simplify my year.  And yet then I spend the majority of the year acquiring things.  I love to shop.  But then instead of simply living, I am spending my time, acquiring and organizing things.

3. The art of shopping that I so enjoy is helping to create the outer trappings of the life that I want to lead, without actually taking the necessary steps to have that life.

For 2015, here's to living the life, not just furnishing the life.